Dual Booting
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Dual Booting, also sometimes called Multiboot, is a process by which you can install multiple operating systems on your device, and select between them when booting it up.
postmarketOS doesn't currently support dual booting through recovery, yet there are a few ways this can be achieved:
- On the Nokia N900, u-boot provides a mechanism to select the OS. See Nokia N900#Installation
- One more way with u-boot: U-Boot_porting#Implement_multiboot_involving_Android_in_a_device_aport
- On fastboot devices that have an SD card, it is possible to install postmarketOS on the SD card, and boot through
pmbootstrap flasher boot
. This has the advantage of not modifying anything on the phone itself, but a USB cable and a host device (like a computer) are needed to boot the device with this procedure. - On (?some?) fastboot devices, the recovery partition holds nothing but a second fastboot boot image. With the postmarketOS boot image flashed to the recovery partition and the root image flashed to either an internal partition or an sdcard, you should be able to dualboot (this works on xiaomi-santoni and samsung-degaswifi)
- On msm8916 devices with lk2nd the boot image is loaded from an ext2 boot partition either on EMMC or SD card. Since lk2nd keeps backwards compatibility with android boot images, you can flash your android boot.img via lk2nd and it will boot that image unless an SD card with postmarketOS is inserted.
- efidroid might be used together with postmarketOS, but has not been tested
- Probably multiboot can be implemented with any second stage bootloader, capable of running linux (for example lk2nd)
See also
- FAQ Entry.
- "http://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/-/issues/421" describes potentially how to implement this.